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Emotion as Personal Relatedness
R. Peter Hobson
Emotion Review 2012 4: 169
DOI: 10.1177/1754073911430141
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Emotion Review
Vol. 4, No. 2 (April 2012) 169­–175
© The Author(s) 2012
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073911430141
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Emotion as Personal Relatedness
R. Peter Hobson
Developmental Psychopathology Research Unit, Tavistock Clinic, UK
Institute of Child Health, University College London, UK
Abstract
In this article, I consider the structure of interpersonal emotional relations. I argue that current cognitive-developmental theory
has overestimated the role of conceptual thinking, and underestimated the role of intrinsic social-emotional organization, in the
early development of such feelings as jealousy, shame, and concern. I suggest that human forms of social experience are shaped by
a process through which one individual identifies with the bodily expressed attitudes of other people, and stress the diversity of
self–other relational states. I draw on studies in developmental psychopathology, and specifically research in autism and borderline
personality disorder, to illustrate some implications of this viewpoint.
Keywords
autism, borderline personality disorder, emotion, identification
There is much to gain from studying typical and atypical states
of mind in relation to one another. Through the study of
emotions and feelings in psychiatric illness, we may learn
things about emotions and feelings in human beings who are not
ill. Through the approach of developmental psychopathology,
the study of typical and atypical development in relation to one
another, we can discover facts, or ways of interpreting those
facts, that may change our views on very basic developmental
processes and principles.
In this article I shall draw on studies in developmental psychopathology, and specifically research in autism and borderline personality disorder, in arguing that we need to reconsider
the nature of interpersonal engagement and the feelings that
such engagement entails. My concern is to analyze the structure
of emotional relations towards others, and to suggest how
human beings have a propensity to engage with other people
in an other-person-centered way.
The Primacy of Personal Relations
I begin with a brief account of what passes as conventional
wisdom in contemporary cognitive-developmental psychology
on social emotions. Here is one of the most influential writers
on this topic, Michael Lewis:
In the case of jealousy, envy, empathy, embarrassment, shame, pride,
and guilt … the elicitation of this class of emotions involves elaborate
cognitive processes, and these elaborate cognitive processes have, at
their heart, the notion of self, agency, and conscious intentions. (Lewis,
2003, p. 286)
According to Lewis, it is only when a toddler acquires concepts
of self and other, something that occurs around the middle of the
second year of life, that he or she is in a position to experience
the emotions in question. Therefore in important respects,
Lewis’ account is one in which cognitive development puts
absolute constraints on the development of a wide range of
feelings towards others.
From a conceptual rather than developmental perspective,
many philosophers also seem to have a bias towards analyzing
emotional states in cognitive terms, supposing that thoughts or
beliefs structure feelings. For instance, Taylor (1985, pp. 1–2)
writes: “The interest of the emotions of self-assessment,
for the philosopher at least, lies primarily in the nature and
complexity of the beliefs involved … Over a wide range of
emotions … beliefs are constitutive of the emotional experience
in question.”
There are several reasons to be skeptical about this position.
From a developmental perspective, there is evidence that infants
substantially younger than 18 months old show feelings that
Author note: I thank the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, for hosting a sabbatical on which this article was brought to completion.
Corresponding author: R. Peter Hobson, Developmental Psychopathology Research Unit, Tavistock Clinic, 120 Belsize Lane, London NW3 5BA, UK. Email: [email protected]
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170 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 2
are closely akin to social emotions (Draghi-Lorenz, Reddy,
& Costall, 2001). An especially well-documented example is
that of jealousy (e.g., Hart & Carrington, 2002). Indeed, there
are grounds for believing that dogs and horses feel jealousy.
Morris, Doe, and Godsell (2008) reported that adults who knew
their animals well described jealousy in 81% of dogs and 79%
of horses. Interviews with dog owners revealed that most
instances of jealousy occurred when the carer gave attention to
a person or another dog, and often they involved the dog pushing between the carer and the third party. At other times, dogs’
attention-seeking behavior might involve barking, growling, or
whining, and also aggressiveness towards the rival.
It seems that however complex our description of jealousy,
this is an emotion that can be experienced and expressed in
humans and animals who do not have concepts of self and others.
From a complementary perspective, cognitive-developmental
accounts seem inadequate to encompass the phenomenology
of the emotional states it is supposed to explain. It is far from
obvious how the passionate jealousy of Othello or the haunting
shame of Primo Levi could derive from basic emotions such as
anger or fear plus an ability to think about oneself and others.
So, too, from a philosophical perspective, Goldie (2000)
criticizes “the over-intellectualization of emotion” (2000, p. 11)
in philosophical writings. Goldie illustrates his objection thus:
“What really comes first is the emotional response itself – the
feeling of fear towards the snake – and not the thought that its
bite is poisonous and the thought that poison would harm me”
(2000, p. 45). Not only is intentionality intrinsic to emotion, but
the intentionality of beliefs and related mental states may be
derived from, rather than underpin, emotional relations (Hobson,
2010). It would seem plausible that in early development, the
representational content of propositional attitudes—the human
ability to think in terms of a “that” that is desired, believed, or
whatever—arises by a process of differentiating out such
“propositions” from the cognitive aspect of attitudes for which
a “that” does not yet exist as a cognitively separable entity. As I
shall describe, one basis for such distilling-out is a very young
child’s experience and assimilation of other people’s different
attitudes towards a shared world.
So for the kinds of “social emotion” listed by Lewis, we
can acknowledge that the acquisition of concepts of self and
other may alter and augment a range of emotional experiences,
but at the same time resist the conclusion that acquiring such
concepts is a necessary precondition for having all the
feelings in question. As Frijda (1993, p. 374) expresses the
matter: “… even emotions like anger, guilt, and shame, that
have cognitively complex definitions, can result from rather
elementary stimulus constellations, and through rather
elementary appraisal processes.”
More than this, there are grounds for supposing that at least
some social emotions structure self–other awareness and provide
foundations for deriving concepts of self and other. Consider how
Sartre (1956, p. 350) stresses that one discovers oneself in shame:
. . . I am that Ego; I do not reject it as a strange image, but it is present
to me as a self which I am without knowing it; for I discover it in
shame and, in other instances, in pride. It is shame or pride which
reveals to me the Other’s look and myself at the end of that look. It is
the shame or pride which makes me live, not know the situation of
being looked at.
According to this perspective, self–other poles of experience are
constitutive of certain emotional states, as givens inherent in the
structure of the emotions rather than as components derived
from cognitively elaborated understandings. It is not so much
that self-concepts underlie shame (although they may alter the
conditions of feeling shame), but rather, shame contributes to
self-experience and the content of self-concepts. Part of what
people conceptualize selves to be is determined by how
they experience themselves in feeling shame, envy, jealousy,
competitiveness, and so on. If we could not feel shame or other
forms of self-implicating emotions, our concept of self would
be impoverished to a corresponding degree.
Here I have been emphasizing particular forms of social
emotion such as jealousy and shame, but the emotional and
relational underpinnings for our concepts of mind, as well as
for concepts of self and other people whose minds these are,
are much broader than this. For example, as Hamlyn (1974;
also Hobson, 1993) has argued, one could not acquire the concept of persons with minds unless one experienced appropriate
forms of relation with persons, including relations with feeling.
Indeed, there are grounds for supposing that the acquisition of
concepts at all is dependent upon interpersonal engagement
and the agreements in judgment that such relations afford
(Hamlyn, 1978). This view is consonant with the notion that
human beings need to take the role of the other in order to
acquire self-reflective awareness and symbolic thinking (Mead,
1934)—where such role-taking is achieved prior to an
­understanding of what it means to adopt perspectives.
One is led to consider the primacy of emotional relations for
perspective-taking and for acquiring the means to conceptual
thought, including thinking about minds. As Malcolm (1962,
p. 92) insists, concluding with a quotation from Wittgenstein
(1958, p. 226), modes of relatedness are primary:
As philosophers we must not attempt to justify the forms of life, to give
reasons for them – to argue, for example, that we pity the injured man
because we believe, assume, presuppose, or know that in addition to the
groans and writhing, there is pain. The fact is, we pity him! “What has
to be accepted, the given is – so one could say – forms of life.”
The Structure of Emotional Relations
The question arises: What is the preconceptual structure of
social emotions? In order to address this question, it may be
worthwhile to consider what an adequate response would
entail.
Firstly, as already indicated, the account would need to
explain forms of noninferential role-taking that emerge in
infancy and probably continue throughout life. Secondly, it
would need to encompass not only feeling towards others, but
also feeling for others. Thirdly, it should characterize how
social emotions contribute to self–other awareness, and to the
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Hobson Emotion as Personal Relatedness 171
formation and contents of self-concepts. Fourthly, if possible,
it should account for patterns of atypicality among individuals
with developmental psychopathology in social emotions.
In fact, this latter perspective, and specifically research in
autism, has been instrumental in giving shape to a particular
view of the processes responsible for the developmental phenomena under consideration. Children with autism show atypicalities in the features of development just outlined: marked
limitations in relational and communicative role-taking, illorganized feeling towards and for others, and restrictions in
self-awareness. These and other aspects of autism become
more intelligible if one posits that the children lack (or relatively lack) something critical for typical early development,
namely a capacity to structure self–other relations through the
propensity to identify with the attitudes of other people. Here
the claim is that in order to make sense of autism and typical
development in relation to one another, it is necessary to posit
that from early in life, the propensity to identify with others is
a natural organizing principle of social experience. This propensity has biological underpinnings that may be missing
among children who come to manifest the syndrome of autism.
What, then, does it mean to identify with someone else?
The notion is one rooted in psychoanalytic theory (e.g., Freud,
1921/1955), according to which (in its contemporary, “object
relations” form) social experience has a self–other structure
from the beginning of life. The paradigmatic case of social
experience entails a representation of self, a representation of
someone else (or in the case of infants, some part or function
of someone else), and an interaction between the two. I shall
not dwell on whether “representation” is quite right here (I
suspect it is not), but the importance of the idea of identification is that one’s experience encompasses what one takes to be
an other-person-centered psychological stance. Moreover, this
other’s-stance-as-experienced can become a stance one can
make one’s own. Through identification, one both perceives
and responds to another person’s bodily expressed attitudes as
belonging to that person, and one can come to incorporate the
attitude-as-perceived into one’s own emotional repertoire.
Importantly, identifying-with has cognitive, motivational,
and affective aspects (not components; Hobson, 2008). So
we can appreciate the force of the following definition of
identification from Laplanche and Pontalis (1973, p. 205):
Psychological process whereby the subject assimilates an aspect,
property or attribute of the other and is transformed, wholly or partially,
after the model the other provides. It is by means of a series of
identifications that the personality is constituted and specified.
The picture becomes more complicated once one appreciates
that the process of identifying-with not only structures emotional life and self-development, but also develops new variants
such as identifying with another person’s values or personality.
Yet it is with relatively simple (albeit not the simplest, very
early) forms of identification, apparent towards the end of the
first year of a typically developing infant’s life, that we are most
concerned here.
Consider, for example, social referencing as an expression
of early, preconceptual role-taking in which another person’s
attitudes are identified-with and “made one’s own.” The paradigmatic instance occurs when, in the presence of an adult, an
infant is confronted with an emotionally ambiguous object or
event. In one well-known early study (Sorce, Emde, Campos,
& Klinnert, 1985), what seemed like a cliff prevented very
young children from reaching a goal. Typically, infants looked
towards and then responded to the affective expression of a
parent, as this had directedness to the visual cliff. Fourteen
out of 19 12-month-olds who perceived that their mothers
were looking to the cliff with smiles tentatively proceeded
towards their goal, whereas none of those who witnessed their
mothers showing fear in relation to the cliff did so. The fact
that the objects at the focus of the adult’s attitudes change in
meaning for the infant has been demonstrated through modifying the procedures (Hornik, Risenhoover, & Gunnar, 1987;
Walden & Ogan, 1988). Here we see how the infant is able to
identify with the attitudes of the other as “other,” such that the
world comes to have meaning according to oneself as identified with the other, and therefore (potentially at least) a new
meaning for oneself.
Such movements in affective stance establish a framework
within which a child can come to conceptualize—that is,
think about—how different persons have different takes on
the same shared world, somewhere around the middle of the
second year. Social co-orientation in relation to given objects
or events is such as to establish the possibility of the infant
coming to differentiate how two person-anchored attitudes
can be brought to bear on the same object or event in the environment. In addition, from around the end of the first year the
infant begins to adopt the stance of the other towards his or
her own attitudes, which as Mead (1934) described, is important for at least some forms of reflective self-awareness. The
reversibility of communication—that what X means when
you use it to communicate something to me is what X means
when I use it to communicate to you—and the emancipation
of meanings from the objects in which those meanings inhere
pave the way for symbolic thought (Hobson, 2002).
I stress how the developmental implications of social referencing depend not only on the infant’s adjustments in attitude
through responsiveness to another person’s bodily expressed
attitudes as these are directed to a shared world, but also upon
the infant experiencing this shift as occurring through another
source of attitudes, that is, another person. It is critical for
developments in social understanding that the infant should
register the shift as a shift across perspectives, not merely as a
change in the meaning of objects at the focus of referencing, if
the infant is to come to understand what it means to hold a
perspective. The idea of “registering” here may be illustrated
with reference to those forms of joint attention that involve
children showing things to others, and having interest in the
other person’s reactions. If the children were unable to register
those responses as other-person-centered—and this need not
imply that they understand people to have minds, except in a
special sense—then such behavior is difficult to explain. I am
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172 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 2
suggesting that a child’s ability to maintain a distinction
between what is experienced directly and what is experienced
through others is critical for that child to acquire conceptual
understanding of people’s subjective orientations towards
the world.
I should add that identifying-with is not simulating. In this
process, one does not “use” someone else as a model for one’s
own actions or attitudes, nor, a fortiori, does one imaginatively
put oneself in the shoes of someone else. On the contrary, the
account of identifying-with is supposed to provide the starting
point for a developmental account to explain how such imaginative role-taking abilities arise. The idea is that paradigmatically
(and special considerations enter into the account of infant
experience), interpersonal relations are structured in such a way
that as part of his/her emotional state, a person (A) experiences
someone else (B) as having his or her own attitudes. However A
experiences B’s emotional state—a complex matter, because
this is a part of A’s experience, not B’s—this B-derived part of
A’s emotional state may shape A’s subsequent actions and
attitudes through identification. Whether identifying-with
always has to be emotional is a moot point, and one that may
become clarified through the study of autism.
The Case of Autism
Autism is a syndrome, which means a constellation of clinical
features that happen to co-occur. Central among the features of
autism are impairments in social relations, deficits in creative
flexible thinking and language, and the presence of unusual
mannerisms and/or preoccupations. The classic description by
Kanner (1943) conveys something of the children’s relatedness
towards others. For example, Kanner wrote the following about
5-year-old Paul (1943, Case 4, p. 228): “He never looked up at
people’s faces. When he had any dealings with persons at all, he
treated them, or rather parts of them, as if they were objects.”
Additional details concerning the children’s lack of engagement with the attitudes of others can be gathered from parent
reports. Wimpory, Hobson, Williams, and Nash (2000) interviewed parents of children with and without autism under 4
years old, prior to diagnosis, about the children’s behavior in the
first 2 years of life. The parents’ reports indicated that as infants,
none of those who turned out to have autism had shown frequent
or intense eye contact, engaged in turn-taking with adults, or
used noises communicatively, whereas half of the matched children without autism were reported to show each of these kinds of
behavior. There were also fewer infants with autism who greeted
or waved to their parents, or who directed feelings of anger and
distress towards people. In addition, not one of the infants with
autism, but at least half the infants in the control group, were
reported to offer or give objects to others in the first 2 years of
life. The children seemed to be less connected with other people for their own sake, but also less connected with or able to
share others’ affective attitudes to a shared world (Charman
et al., 1997; Sigman, Kasari, Kwon, & Yirmiya, 1992).
Hobson, Chidambi, Lee, and Meyer (2006) interviewed parents of older children with and without autism, aged between
approximately 6 and 13 years. Parents felt they could recognize
in their children with autism not only emotions such as anger
and fear, but also emotional responsiveness to other people’s
mood states, as well as shyness and non-person-directed pride.
Yet seldom could they cite clear instances of other-personcentered emotions such as guilt, shame, pity, empathic concern,
or embarrassment.
This latter investigation also involved a set of quasiexperimental studies which yielded compatible findings. For example, when children with autism felt responsible for the leg
falling off a doll, they were less likely than nonautistic participants to show a “guilty looks” pattern of orientation towards
the tester that included expressions of relief when the tester
reassured them that the doll was already broken; and when they
received the attentions of a cuddly toy wielded by a playful
tester, they rarely showed “reengagement looks” that give coyness a specially intimate quality. This was despite the fact that
the participants with autism showed many signs of being aware
when they were the focus of attention. It seemed that there was
a dissociation between these participants’ self-consciousness in
being observed, and their ability to be affected by and engaged
with the attitudes of a particular embodied other person.
A final illustration comes from a study on anticipatory
concern (Hobson, Harris, García-Pérez, & Hobson, 2009).
Here children witnessed one adult tearing another (non­
responsive) adult’s drawing. In contrast to children without
autism, who expressed dismay, questioned the perpetrator,
and showed concern towards the victim, most children with
autism showed very little indication of feeling for the person
whose drawing it was. For example, few responded to the
sight of the adult tearing the drawing by giving an immediate
look to the victim, a reaction that was not only very common
among those without autism, but also seemed to reflect how
swiftly they identified with and anticipated the hurt the person
would feel. The victim had shown no overt expression, yet the
children without autism immediately orientated towards, and
showed concern for, this person.
These studies capture how certain forms of role-taking are
less apparent among individuals with autism. But do such limitations in role-taking reflect a diminished capacity to identify
with the attitudes of other people? The case for this suggestion
has been bolstered by research on nonverbal and verbal communication, as well as imitation, among children with autism
(e.g., García-Pérez, Lee, & Hobson, 2007; Hobson, García-Pérez,
& Lee, 2009; Hobson & Lee, 1999; Hobson, Lee, & Hobson,
2007). For instance, in the Sticker Test of Hobson and Meyer
(2005), children without autism would often employ a point-tothemselves to communicate that a tester should place a sticker
on herself. They appeared to identify with the tester, and presume
she in turn would identify with them pointing-to-themselves
and place the sticker on her own (i.e., the tester’s) body.
Participants with autism seldom adjusted their communication
in this mutually co-ordinated, person-anchored way. Instead,
most pointed directly to the tester’s body.
In summary, a cluster of abilities that depend upon otherperson-centered experience, and that usually appear early in
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Hobson Emotion as Personal Relatedness 173
life, appear to be notable for their relative absence among
children with autism. Importantly, these abilities extend across
a range of communicative and emotionally configured social
relations—so much so, that one might surmise there is an
intimate connection between “feeling for” and “communicating
for” someone else. What is missing among children with autism
highlights what is present among children without autism,
namely forms of emotional engagement through which a child
is moved in psychological attitude by the bodily expressed
­attitudes of someone else.
The Case of Borderline Personality Disorder
A second, very different perspective comes from research on
borderline personality disorder. Individuals are said to have
this syndrome when they meet five out of nine diagnostic criteria: a pattern of intense, unstable relationships; impulsiveness in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging;
affective instability; inappropriate, intense anger or lack of
control of anger; recurrent suicidal threats or self-mutilating
behavior; marked and persistent identity disturbance; chronic
feelings of emptiness or boredom; frantic efforts to avoid real
or imagined abandonment; and transient paranoid or dissociative symptoms. It is far from self-evident that defined in this
way, the syndrome of borderline personality disorder should be
associated with any particular forms of self–other experience
and mental representation.
In this case, the evidence (to date) bears not so much the
organization of emotion early in life, although it may well be
relevant for this, as upon disturbed patterns of self–other
relations that characterize the syndrome and illustrate the
­
interpersonal structure of at least some emotional states.
One study evaluated hostile–helpless states of mind in
women with borderline personality disorder, as these states
were manifest in transcripts from an interview concerned with
significant early relationships (Lyons-Ruth, Melnick, Patrick,
& Hobson, 2007). Raters assessed the extent to which participants mentally represented attachment figures in contradictory
and malevolent ways, and whether they appeared to assume
(identify with) the characteristics of these figures. The results
were that all the women with borderline personality disorder,
compared with half the group with chronic depression,
displayed hostile–helpless states of mind. The former group
manifested a higher frequency of globally devaluing representations, and there was a strong trend for more of this group to
show identification with a hostile or devalued caregiver (58%
borderline vs. 18% with chronic depression).
One statement reflecting identification with a devalued
caregiver was:
… and I used to shout at them in the same way that people I felt threatened
by people who used to tell me off like school teachers and things, and my
mother. I use the same tone and say the same sort of things.
Here one sees how the patient feels caught up in enacting
towards others just “the same sort of [threatening] things”
that she felt her mother displayed towards herself.
At the time of being threatened, of course, this person’s
state would not match that of her mother. Being threatened is
not the same as being threatening. Yet perhaps the correct way
to characterize the person’s reported experience was something like “being threatened by a shouting mother,” where the
“by a shouting mother” part of the description is essential to
the original emotional state. The mother’s contribution to the
state is registered within that state in such a way as to be available for identifying-with at a subsequent time. Children’s
play provides abundant manifestations of just this kind of
interpersonally grounded process.
In another study (Hobson, Patrick, & Valentine, 1998), we
had psychotherapy trainees watch 30-minute videotapes of interviews with patients, and judge patterns of relatedness according
to a scale that included ratings of the degree to which the person
showed such features as “clear or subtle indications of locked-in
hostility, abuse, victimization, and/or controlled/controlling
relations (including sadomasochism),” or experienced the interviewer as “narcissistic, self-preoccupied, unattuned, using others
for self-gratification” or “emotionally available and caring, with
recognition of the needs and wishes of others.” The patients with
borderline personality disorder were almost completely distinguishable from those with chronic depression, in virtue of their
manifesting the more disturbed (“paranoid–schizoid”) forms of
relatedness.
Once again, self–other-structured emotional relations characterized a syndrome with a broad range of clinical features.
These patients’ emotional difficulties, although sometimes portrayed by psychiatrists as disorders of mood, comprised emotionally charged personal relations of relatively specific kinds.
What psychiatrists abstract as “affective instability” or “intense
anger” in the criteria for borderline personality disorder are just
that—abstracted from the interpersonal dynamics of which
these emotional features are an aspect. When abstracted in this
way, the emotions lose the specific qualities of personal
relatedness that make them the particular emotions, for instance
the emotional state of locked-in hostility toward someone else,
that they are.
It might be argued that this is all very well, and perhaps it is
a mistake for psychiatrists to analyze such relations into simpler feelings or character traits, but it does not tell us much
about the structure of emotions per se, and certainly not much
about what is “basic” in the developmental story. True, studies
such as these cannot establish the developmental primacy or
otherwise of this or that characteristic of emotional life. Yet
the research may do more than illustrate patterns of social-­
emotional relatedness and the operation of identifying-with.
It may also prompt us to question whether it is anything but
prejudice that leads us to suppose that such seemingly complex relational states are built up out of simpler building
blocks. There is an alternative possibility: there are biologically configured propensities to experience highly structured personal relations, out of which we might choose to
abstract (or onto which we might seek to impose) notions of
simple emotions. As Goldie (2000, p. 19) argues, “Any suggestion that our emotional feelings towards things can be
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174 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 2
understood as, or analyzed into, simple terms … should be
strongly resisted. Surely we all know that emotional feelings
are not that simple.”
On the face of it, the phenomenology of relational states
manifest in borderline psychopathology does not lend itself to
analysis in terms of familiar basic or not-so-basic emotions.
Here the person’s experiences of others are the stuff of nightmares, for example, in feeling threats of intrusion or victimization. The possibility arises that such states tap into something
that exists from early in development and is “basic” to human
nature—after all, persecutory states are more or less ubiquitous
as a potential for human beings—and moreover something that
may be organized and detoxified into “simpler” and more
integrated emotional-relational states through early relationships.
In this case, if a child’s early social relations are troubled, then
such development may be compromised. This is what many
psychoanalysts claim to be the case.
Conclusions
Often we think of emotions in a way that is disembedded from
the relations between an embodied organism and its relations
with the world. We talk about “anger,” “fear,” and so on,
abstracting feeling states from the objects towards which the
feelings are felt. This may be a mistake. In the realm of social
engagement, it may be more appropriate to consider emotions
as relational states that implicate self–other poles of experience.
For example, it may be more accurate to characterize one’s
fear towards someone as fear towards a threatening other or
fear towards an abandoning other, and so on.
In this article, I have dwelt on the propensity of human beings
to identify with the attitudes of other people—a process for
which we have evidence in 9-month-old typically developing
children, but one that appears to be compromised or fragile
among children with autism—and stressed its importance for
experiencing and being moved by other people as centers of subjectivity. This enables one person to feel for as well as towards
another, and enriches (or sometimes poisons) one’s attitudes
towards the world and oneself through engaging with others.
After all, it is a commonplace to observe how children who
are threatened can become children who make threats, and how
children who are abandoned can become adults who abandon.
Such processes, at a deep and primitive level, may hold the key
to the genesis as well as nature of borderline personality disorder.
Although development in the process of identifying-with
may occur in part through cognitive advances, early expressions of this emotionally configured process appear to be partly
independent of cognitive (or at least conceptual) components.
To identify with someone else has cognitive, affective, and
motivational aspects, so, for example, one is “moved” in feeling and in proneness to certain forms of action by becoming
engaged with the plight of other people, but this does not mean
that the process has separable cognitive, affective, and motivational
prerequisites.
If all this is correct, then there are profound implications
for our view of emotional life and for our understanding of
psychiatric disorder. Autism and borderline personality disorder
illustrate this in two very different ways.
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